Tuesday, November 13, 2012

GWU to hold gala luncheon for departing dean

Paul Berman, who became George Washington's dean in July of last year, is leaving the position in January for a newly created job --" vice provost for online education and academic innovation" -- in GWU's central administration.

Since I've heard little about the back story of this move from my many close friends on the GWU faculty (and indeed it appears to have come as a total surprise to them), I will echo Peggy Noonan's words of wisdom and note that it would be irresponsible not to speculate.

The timing of this move is very peculiar, especially because it's taking place right in the middle of the academic year.My guess is that soon to be ex-Dean Berman is getting out while the getting is good. Times being what they are, any law school dean, and especially one at a trap school, needs to be on the lookout for a soft landing spot. Berman, I suspect, has no particular desire to spend the next few years being the guy who makes the kinds of hard decisions that will need to be made at law schools like GWU to get their operating costs in some sort of rational relationship with the value of the degrees they're conferring.

University administrators get rewarded for successful empire-building, not for ceding Germania to the Visigoths. And while Rome wasn't sacked in a day, legal education's empire is looking a lot shakier than on-line education, which, let's face it, is the face of the future in this business (Alfred North Whitehead's remark a century ago that the university has been obsolete since the invention of the printing press was merely one hundred years and one technological revolution ahead of its time).

Berman's now apparently concluded career in legal academia is a remarkable testament to the structure of the contemporary law school. He managed to become dean of two law schools without, as far as I can determine, ever practicing law for a day in his life (He graduated from law school in 1995, did COA and SCOTUS clerkships for the next two years, then went straight onto the UCONN faculty. The most interesting aspect of his biography is that he ran what apparently is an off-off Broadway theater in NYC for about four years between Princeton undergrad and NYU law -- a job which sounds like it involved more than a few full working days).

He's apparently very good at raising money, which is what both deaning and central administrating is all about these days, so he's likely to continue to flourish in the topsy turvey world of contemporary higher ed. That he's bailing out of legal academia at this particular moment is more than a little suggestive of which way the wind is blowing.

"He managed to become dean of two law schools without, as far as I can determine, ever practicing law for a day in his life (He graduated from law school in 1995, did COA and SCOTUS clerkships for the next two years, then went straight onto the UCONN faculty."

Unlike "professor" Campos who spent almost 12 months "practicing" law before he joined the ranks of the scammers. I'll take the COA/SCOTUS clerk over the first year associate any time.

Really? A professor's experience should translate into teachable moments for the students who will be able to use that experience in their professional lives. Therefore, the question is: How many law students will become SCOTUS law clerks and how many will become first year associates?

I'll take a professor who has actually practiced law in a law firm over a SCOTUS law clerk any day.

I go to a law school that's similar to GW in many ways (what you would probably call a trap school). I've been here only a year and a half, and in that time I have seen 10 administrators, maybe more, quit. Many of them also in the middle of the year. My fellow classmates don't see anything wrong with it, but I found it disconcerting from the beginning.

i was wondering what exactly a "trap school" was and then i found out it was something coined from this blog.

here's the definition for everyone:

"A trap school, in other words, is the kind of place that attracts the kind of highly-qualified, reasonably prudent 0Ls who would never consider attending the vast majority of law schools at anything like sticker price, and yet still ends up generating a very high risk of financial and personal disaster for its students."

Plenty of Career Services office turnover, as well as Alumni Relations people. The frontline of having to deal with the actual mess.

Now deans seem to be turning over rather quickly. Raise money?! Is that what they do? Is it possible that there are any deans actually successful at this, and, if so, can explain how that success does not lead to a corresponding skip in 6% tuition yearly raises?

IMHO this country suffers greatly from such hierarchical management structures where there is way too much power concentrated in way too few people, who make way more than their work could ever be worth.

No amount of resources, no matter how "insane", will alter the fact that the law schools are producing at least two graduates for every available job. Reallocation of resources might change which particular students get jobs, but 50% or more will still never obtain professional, legal employment.

Years ago I had to leave a part-time MBA program in North Carolina to take a job in the DC area. I visited the GW admissions office and asked about admissions and fees per course. The little cupcake at the desk quoted me a figure so obscenely high I thought she must have thought I asked her for the cost of a full academic load. "No, she said, that IS the tuition for one course."

Your trying to fit this set of facts into your ongoing meme would assume this was a voluntary move on Dean Berman's part. That he wanted to bail out of legal academia, rather than being pushed out for whichever one of a whole host of reasons -- good and bad -- that might cause a President to oust a Dean.

I have no more inside info than you do here (which is none), but the circumstances look more like someone pushed out than someone trying to get out.

"Instead, we need to accept and perhaps even celebrate, the potentially jurisgenerative and creative role law might play in a plural world.Indeed, it is only if we take multiple affiliation seriously, if we seek dialogueacross difference, if we accept unassimilated otherness, that we will have somehope of navigating the hybrid legal spaces that are all around us." -- Paul Schiff Berman, Toward a Jurisprudence of Hybridity, 2010 Utah L. Rev. 11, 29 (2010).

To suggest that this visionary lower himself to the vulgar practice of law would be like asking Einstein to scrub the toilets. Similarly, the plaints of the legion of unemployed GW Law grads whom Berman sought to discipline by cutting their little nine month stipends from $15 to $10/ hr. seems so cruel and intrusive. Why should Berman waste his beautiful mind on something like that? (Cf. Barbara Bush).

I am glad that Berman has moved on from the deanship to something even more critical to the law school scam, and to higher education generally: how to justify extracting 50K per year in tuition in an age when doctrinal instruction and interactive discussion and debate can be done digitally. Hopefully, Berman's great mind will not further disturbed by human beings, as he navigates the hybrid scam swamps that are all around us.

I had Berman at UConn in the mid 2000s. His class was all theory, buzzwords, and reflection. Don't think I learned one useful thing. He is amusing and a good speaker. . .just not very helpful for practicing law.

"Jurisgenerative" is, to my ears, a brand new buzzy word. I've got to admit that I had a disgraceful Beavis-and-Butthead reaction-- I thought: maybe certain kinds of sex offenders go around exposing their jurisgenitals in public.

A quick Westlaw search of "jurisgenerative" reveals the following:

Number of times a reviewing court has used the word "jurisgenerative" (based on an "All States & Fed" search, unrestricted as to date): Once.

Number of times a law review article has used the word "jurisgenerative": 335.

Yes, we do have to hope that Obama has a "Nixon goes to China" moment and cuts off the money from some of his most blind financial backers.

Highlighting the increasingly premeditated use of IBR as the engine for endless tuition inflation will help.

Obama's re-election notwithstanding, income taxpayers (the 51%!) are increasingly terrified and looking for exits from the dollar (which is the last American institution standing - but the one damaged when the Fed prints more and more money (QEternity) to keep interest rates from rising due to the $16 trillion debt (and rising).

Want to get dizzy with fear?

Think about the additional tax revenue needed for each 1% that the Fed "allows"/is forced to allow interest rates to rise.

160 *billion* in additional interest payments.

Each year.

Forever.

(Or until principal on the national debt is paid down - which might as well be forever).

When America goes Greece (when the majority awakes to find itself hopelessly impoverished to enrich political class "elites"), law schools (and law school personnel) will burn.

I must say, that I am glad I went to the law school that I did. Many of these other schools are just downright awful sounding. At Brooklyn Law School, I am amazed at the effort that is put in finding grads and alumni jobs. Also, Brooklyn Law School seems to be moving in the right direction in considering opening its own law firm to help students get real experience practicing law before graduation. Maybe it's because I am in New York, a city with a relatively healthy legal economy, but I must say, I am damn happy that I chose Brooklyn Law School.

I wonder if the school admitting that it inflated the grades of incoming students had ANYTHING to do with the dean moving to an obscure position at the "university." That could just be a coincidence, right, trolls?!?!

JD Junkyard forum has an item today re: GWU admitting to falsifying stats on its entering class (claiming a false % of students in the top 10% undergrad). Wonder if this has anything to do with it . . .

No. "claiming a false % of students in the top 10% undergrad" clearly refers to a false claim about students being in the top 10% of their undergrad class. Why else would 11:51 also query whether that had anything to do with the dean of the law school's departure?

So it appears that the Dean angered the faculty by mistreating the staff in his attempts to change the law school in response to the legal education crisis.

Most likely, the Dean was attempting to cull administrative bloat, perhaps in a way that would have resulted in more work or less assistance for the faculty.

This is just another example of how disingenuous tenured faculty are being when they claim they have "no control" over the governance of the law school and couldn't decide to lower tuition or cut class size even if they wanted to.

Law professors who claim they are:1. powerless to change the tuition charged to students, and2. so in demand by top firms that they must be paid accordingly,should now become the focus of the scam movement.

Agreed. This is clearly a case of an archaic academic stratocracy exerting their power over the administration's attempts to change the focus of legal education to account for the dwindling traditional legal market. I know that many others agree that while Berman may have made some minor errors (as any leader of any organization does time to time), he was on the path to positioning GW Law at the forefront of a changing legal market. The faculty clearly would rather live in the clouds than accept changes that will provide students like me with a greater opportunity of applying my legal education to a career outside of the traditional scope of private or public sector law practice. This should serve as a wake up call to all law students that we need to take a hard look at who is really at the forefront of the law school scam.

lets see. obamacare threatens about 800,000 jobs. 20,000 or so law schools thought they were special snowflakes and would be able to get a decent job. they were wrong and now cant pay their students loans. yeah, that's a smart decision.

i'm sure those 800,000 unemployed people will be lining up for legal services.

"Instead, we need to accept and perhaps even celebrate, the potentially jurisgenerative and creative role law might play in a plural world.Indeed, it is only if we take multiple affiliation seriously, if we seek dialogueacross difference, if we accept unassimilated otherness, that we will have somehope of navigating the hybrid legal spaces that are all around us." -- Paul Schiff Berman, Toward a Jurisprudence of Hybridity, 2010 Utah L. Rev. 11, 29 (2010).

Lemmings would be better served attending a university named after George Jefferson. He was a self made job creator in a viable industry. At least learning how to run a dry.cleaning chain from someone who.had experience would be worth some tuition cost.

Just before graduation, TJSL interviews its graduating students. This “exit interview” is mandatory for all graduating students. During the exit interview, TJSL obtains employment data for each graduating student. Thus, TJSL knows the employment status of every student at graduation. Nevertheless, TJSL reftised to report a figure for “employed at graduation” to US News for every year from 2002-2012, even though that information was readily available. In the 2013 edition, TJSL reported that “graduates whose employment status is unknown” was 71 percent (and that TJSL only had employment data for 29 percent of its graduates).

...

Loomis was unemployed for the first two years after she graduated from TJSL. TJSL, though, reported Loomis as employed. Specifically, TJSL reported that Loomis was employed at the San Diego City Attorney’s Office. Loomis never worked at the San Diego City Attorney’s Office. Loomis graduated from TJSL with $200,000 in debt. That figure has since increasedto approximately $220,000 in principal and interest because she has been unable to pay down her loans.

...

For the Class of 2006, there was a direct correlation between a graduate’semployment status and his or her last name. Graduates whose last names started with A through N were all employed; graduates whose names started with S and T were all studying for the Bar Examination; and graduates whose last names started with W were all unemployed. (TJSL recently admitted that its purported data for the Class of 2006 was inaccurate).

TJSL has classified a pool cleaner, waiters and waitresses, and26 retail store clerks as working in jobs requiring a law degree. ... TJSL admits that its policy is to categorize all unskilled labor positions as “business/industry,” including TJSL graduates who are employed as a stripper, cocktail waitresses, and restaurant servers.

...

TJSL reports median salary figures based on only a handful of graduates who self-report. For instance, in 2009 and 2010, TJSL reported that the median salary for its graduates was approximately $60,000. These figures were based on responses from only 14 percent and 12 percent of graduates, respectively.=============

I don't have any knowledge of this fellow Berman, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he took the Dean's job under the "old model" approach to the job, meaning he was there to raise money, market the school, keep the tuition money from hapless student conduits of taxpayer backed funds, and engage in image building. Let's assume too that as things go he did an acceptable job at these tasks.

These skill sets seem totally unsuited for the challenge at hand. GW Law school needs an operational and financial specialist who is willing to completely disrupt the overhead structure of the school. That is likely in very few administrator's DNA. I don't really see who would really want to take this job at this juncture. He or she would have to have incredible support from the President of the University to support massive change and downsizing. Because of tenure and the entitled attitude of the staff, it is an almost impossible job.

I know this seems like an unduly negative view, but the actual tuition paid here must be plummeting.

IMHO, I think those "scandals" were no more than a minor speed bump in Berman's time as the Dean. I completely agree with the first post that a large school like GW needs a major overhaul in order to survive both the reduction in the number of legal jobs and law school applicants as a whole while maintaining its position as a major player in the rankings.

I think it's clear that he was trying to introduce these sorts of changes and the law school faculty was simply not having it. What's really necessary is an overhaul of the entire old-fashioned tenure system and that would seem to be the next logical step -- the faculty likely saw this coming with the changes he had already instituted. They clearly just want to maintain a system of milking students for everything their worth to maintain their salaries. The admitted body this year already dropped from about 550 to 400 or so.

OT, but worth a read. Linds Redding, Fatally Ill Ad Executive, Blogs About Wasting Life On Work http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/11/13/linds-redding-ad-executive-dying-cancer/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl5%7Csec3_lnk3&pLid=234351&a_dgi=aolshare_facebook

As a GW student I was shocked to hear that Dean Berman was leaving because, from what I understand, most of my fellow students really like him. Not to mention, the faculty and administration that I've heard speak about the Dean have always held him in a very favorable light.

This all is very disconcerting because the Dean had developed a personal relationship with many of us. Many of my fellow students and I meet with him regularly to talk about our future professional careers and to ask for academic advice. I haven't heard of a single dean at any academic institution that takes such an interest in every student's success, not to mention law school.

Personally, I was never interested in big-law and felt that most of the law schools at GW's level that I considered going to made this their sole focus. It was Dean Berman's personal phone call that he made to me over the summer that inspired me to attend GW, telling me about the changes he was making that involved a broader focus of the applicability of a legal education to a variety of careers, and a new program for incoming 1L's intended to help us begin marketing ourselves for future careers right from the get-go. A number of my peers and I also participate in a program he set up that matches us with successful practitioners in our fields - this connection continues to be very helpful for me.

I just hope that whoever it is they decide to bring in next follows through with the Dean's efforts to maintain meaningful, personal relationships with students and make changes to prepare us all for the contracting legal market. Hopefully they maintain a policy of focusing on helping students make connections with employers from the start of their legal educations, obtaining real world experience, and eventually placing graduates in a variety of careers where somebody with a legal education is desired (outside of the traditional law firm route).

Without the administration taking these progressive steps in the right direction for the future of our legal education, I see a major backtrack in store for the future of this program. Hopefully he'll still have some sort of a say in the law school's future from his new position.

I think you made bright resolution when you selected this theme of this blog article of yours over here. Do you as a rule compose your blog posts by yourself or you have a business partner or even a helper?